It was on a typically smoggy Beijing morning that my wife Clare and I summoned our three children to give them some big news. No, they weren’t getting another brother or sister, but – cue excited voice – we were moving to America! After the bomb dropped, silence as three small faces absorbed what had just been said, then crumpled into tears.

Change is hard, particularly when inflicted from on high without consultation, but even so the negative reaction caught us slightly by surprise. We had thought, after the initial shock, the children would share our relief to be escaping the sulphurous air that, even as we spoke, hung sickly thick outside the window of our 16th-floor Beijing apartment. Only the previous week the air quality had yet again cancelled my son Billy’s football practice and barred all the children from the school playground for a week. Just think, I ventured to the sports-obsessed seven-year-old and his two sisters, Lila, five and Scarlett, four, you’ll be able to run and play outside every day. We’ll even have a “proper” home, I added hopefully, with a front door, and not a lift.

No one was convinced. “I hate America,” announced the son melodramatically, “they only play stupid sports there, like baseball and basketball. And they don’t know anything about cricket.” The girls’ objections were rather less specific but more unsettling – “But this is our home,” said the youngest, who didn’t remember living in New Delhi or New Zealand before China, and was trying to understand the concept of how another house could also be “home”. It was not an auspicious start to our great American adventure.

That was a little over a year ago. So last weekend, as I watched my son high-fiving his team-mates after hitting a top-of-the-ninth homer in his Little League baseball match, I realised I shouldn’t have worried too much. The girls – less fiercely sure of their Englishness than their older brother – have also settled quickly into the America way. They don’t quite speak with an American accent yet, but when school friends come to play their conversation is laced with a new American twang. They speak of “candy” and “cookies” and the “yard”, and their brother, who still eats his “biscuits” in the “garden”, has stopped remembering to correct them.

Our family is no stranger to transition. The children were all born in New Delhi, then moved to New Zealand and Beijing before Washington DC – and make no mistake, America, while not anything like the cultural leap of India or China, is still a transition. One former British ambassador to Washington used to complain bitterly that Foreign Service officers were given months of language and cultural familiarisation training before being sent to places like Beijing or Moscow, while those sent to America were wrongly assumed not to need any pointers.

All change: the Foster family in their previous home, Beijing (Pic: Katharina Hesse)

The ambassador was right: Americans speak English but that doesn’t mean there are not fundamental differences. I can still remember the shocked look on my neighbour’s face when one weekend, as they called their children in to wash and brush-up for church, it dawned on them that ours were not being brought up to believe. And then there was the elderly man across the street emerging onto his porch the morning after Barack Obama won his second term with a face like a rain cloud. Even before I could issue my usual morning greeting, he barked, without humour: “I don’t want to talk about the election.” Religion and politics burn that much more brightly in America than middle-of-the-road Britain.

But perhaps religion’s deeper relevance in modern America explains the volunteering spirit that still pervades the country. It is visible in our affluent, mainly white suburb of Washington, but also in many of the hard-up small American towns I visited on the 2012 election campaign trail. The donations to local food banks, the monthly community meals in town halls, the local tradesmen who give up a Saturday afternoon to fix-up a vandalised children’s playground, my office intern who completes his school courses, works three seven-hour shifts for the Telegraph and mentors underprivileged kids on the benefits of going to college.

It would be wrong overly to romanticise, but paradoxically the upside of American individualism – the suspicion of big government and the belief in the individual’s inalienable rights – is a belief that communities must take responsibility for themselves, in good times and bad. Even as we say it, we know it is a cliché, but it is the “can-do” spirit that we love best about America, the idea that everyone who can, chips in and helps out.

For us harried parents, with three young children, school is the clearest practical expression of this. If the local state-funded elementary our children attend relied only on the funds disbursed by the local DC government, it would look like much of modern America – frayed around the edges. That it doesn’t is largely down to the PTA, which is not a group that holds the odd bake sale, but a well-oiled fundraising machine that raises close to $500,000 a year.

Every school year begins with a PowerPoint presentation from the energetic head teacher who throws up graphs and bar-charts to illustrate in the starkest possible terms what the school faculty would look like without the parents’ extra donations. The salaries of three-quarters of the partner teachers that are in every classroom, the science programmes, visual, musical, and theatrical arts are all paid for from PTA funds.

And there is pressure. The suggested annual contribution is $1,500 (£980) per child – that’s a good part of the price of a decent holiday if you have three – and that is only just the beginning. Not a week goes by without a demand for donations of either time or money. Every family is asked to find three donations to the school auction – bake a Christmas cake, host a $50 (£33)-a-plate dinner with your national cuisine, make available a week’s rental on your holiday home – and then there are jobs and chores to be done around school: a fence needs to be painted, the school garden needs digging and planting, the girls’ soccer team needs a coach, can anyone bake muffins for a “teacher appreciation breakfast”?

Self-interest is, of course, at play here. As one parent wryly observed, the “next-best option is private school and that’s $30,000 [£19,500] a year”, but it is still a fact that American middle-class parents don’t sit around moaning about the state of education, they get up and do something about it. In the process, they create a community that thrives on self-help and the understanding that if everyone pitches in according to their time and means, everyone benefits. (Where this leaves those sections of American society that cannot afford to help themselves – and America’s ability to break the growing entrenchment of elites and skill-up a globally competitive workforce – is a serious debate for another place.)

Academically speaking, it is too early to say where starting their education in America will leave our children. American children start formal schooling later than the British and the attitudes can sometimes seem rather relaxed. There is a “good job” (praise for everything) ethos that sometimes feels a bit too soft, but on the upside, enthusiasm abounds.

In history the children study not 1066 and all that, but 1776 and the Declaration of Independence, the brutality of the Civil War, the struggles of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, the evils of slavery and the earthy wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. None of which will probably help them pass GCSE history a few years from now, but given America’s short history, it has an obvious contemporary relevance that I don’t remember from my own school days studying the Tudors on an almost yearly rotation.

An English childhood friend who has lived in DC for nearly 20 years and now has two teenage girls at a nearby high school, says she has grown to love the American system – even though it makes such great demands on parents. “When my girls have swim-meets, it takes nearly 40 parents to make it work – event organisers, carpool drivers, marshals, timekeepers,” she says.

Her daughters did a brief spell at private school, but she switched them back because she wanted them to be part of a system that was hooked into the local community.

“American public schools are big, they can be daunting and don’t suit every child, but the good ones are also fiercely competitive and less coddled than private schools,” she says. “And that’s probably closer to what most people find when they enter university and the workplace.”

There are some things that I suspect we will never get used to: the need to order greasy pizza for every school celebration, without anyone wondering how that squares with last week’s lesson on the value of eating whole grains and vegetables. The twice-yearly visits to the dentist where American children spend so long they even have televisions embedded in the ceiling. The infantile drinking laws that require me to produce a passport to buy a pint, even though at 40 I am nearly twice the legal drinking age.

Then there is the slavish devotion to automobiles – the fact our children walk the mile to school and back, rain or shine, is considered “very European”. And what seem to us oddly upside down attitudes to sex and violence: early evening television is littered with adverts for incredibly violent films that have us English parents scrambling for the remote to prevent nightmares, but leaves Americans oddly unfazed. Any kind of sex or swearing, on the other hand, causes palpitations.

Indeed, attitudes to violence in general still leave us baffled. After the initial shock of the Sandy Hook massacre – when the school proposed the children should send condolence cards to Newtown before there was a revolt from those parents, us included, who hadn’t felt it necessary to terrify our children with that news – everyone now seems to have quietly reverted to business as usual.

No doubt these cultural differences – our licentious Godlessness; America’s gun-loving Godliness – will always remain alien, but when we return to Britain we hope the children will carry with them the lessons of the power (and fun) that come from that all-American, can-do community spirit.